Abstract
Abstract. Figuring out the regional ecological environment quality and ecological change is critical for ecological environment monitoring and management and urban construction planning. Based on the remote sensing ecological index (RESI), we evaluate the ecological quality and ecological change from 1999 to 2019 of Anqing city. Multi-temporal Landsat images are used to extract the four indicators of humidity, vegetation, heat and dryness, respectively. Then the RSEI is calculated by principal component analysis. The results show that the ecological quality of Anqing city declined from 1999 to 2019 and then grew slowly from 2009 to 2019. The eco-environmental quality of Anqing city dropped slightly from 1999 to 2019, and the regions with worse quality grades exceeded those becoming better. Particularly, we find that from 1999 to 2009, the area where the ecological quality became better made up 18.31% of the urban area, while the worse ecological area accounted for 29.68% of the urban area; from 2009 to 2019, the area of improved ecological environment reached 24.35%, while the area of degraded quality constituted 41.36%. Land-use changes dominated eco-environmental quality. The areas of poor eco-environmental quality expanded in residential regions and eco-environmental quality of mountainous area improved since returning cultivated land in steep hills into forest. The RSEI results are expected to provide a quantitative foundation for planning sustainable development and the rational use of resources in Anqing city.
Highlights
Since the implementation of the policy of reform and opening up, urbanization process of China has been rising
With the development of remote sensing technology, the methods for monitoring the changes in the urban ecological environment vary from the perspective of urban heat island effect, land use/cover changes, vegetation index changes, etc
The remote sensing ecological index RSEI proposed by Xu comprehensively considers various factors such as vegetation coverage, urban construction and surface temperature, and is suitable for comprehensive evaluation of regional ecological conditions (Xu, 2013)
Summary
Since the implementation of the policy of reform and opening up, urbanization process of China has been rising. The common methods of regional eco-environmental quality evaluation are usually based on a single indicator, such as relative indicator method (Ye and Liu, 2000), fuzzy assessment method (Fu et al, 2005), analytical hierarchy process (Li, 2009) and related analysis method (Gao et al, 1999). These studies only consider the impact of a single factor on the environment, or subjectively define the weight of each factor, which fail to consider the complexity of factors affecting the ecological environment. In this paper, the RSEI index is used to study the ecological environment of the Anqing City, Anhui Province, China to explore the characteristics of spatial and temporal changes of the ecological environment and its driving factors in the process of high-speed urbanization, aiming to provide some support for regional environmental protection
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